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Mar 31

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Ishiguro, long ago

A typical day in the A&R department at Island Records’ London headquarters in November 1975. Four or five people coming in to play their demo tapes to me or my assistant, Howard Thompson, in the semi-basement office in a beautiful stucco house in St Peter’s Square, W6. A lunchtime meeting with Phil Collins, a familiar face from the early days of Brand X, before they went off to sign with Charisma. The early evening rehearsal of a band called the Rockits, evidently a Muff Winwood project. And a note to go and see the still-unsigned Roogalator, with their great American guitarist Danny Adler, at the Kensington pub near the Olympia exhibition halls.

At four o’clock that day there was an appointment with “Ishiguro, K”, bringing a tape for us to hear, evidently from Guildford. Sadly, I have no clear memory of the man or his songs. What I do know is that he would go on publish the first of his eight novels, A Pale View of Hills, in 1982, win the Whitbread Prize for An Artist of the Floating World in 1986, the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day in 1989, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, all of this topped by a knighthood in 2018. So I think one could say that, just a couple of weeks past his 21st birthday and a couple of months into the first year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Kent, Kazuo Ishiguro negotiated what is nowadays known as a sliding-doors moment with some success.

I found that diary entry a couple of years ago, while looking for something else. It came back into my mind while reading the introduction to The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, a book of Ishiguro’s lyrics, written over the last couple of decades for the London-based American jazz singer Stacey Kent.

“I’ve built a reputation as a writer of stories, but I started out writing songs,” he writes, before going on to describe an apprenticeship influenced by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Webb, Tom Jobim, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and many others. He failed in his original ambition to become a successful singer-songwriter, but what’s interesting is the degree to which he believes his eventual mastery of writing fiction was shaped by his early efforts with music, which led him to think that the trick was not to prioritise getting a grip on his readers but rather to find a way of engaging their interest at a different and perhaps more lasting level.

“A song lasts only a few minutes,” he writes. “Its impact can’t afford to reside just in what happens during the moment of direct contact. A song lives or dies by its ability to infiltrate the listener’s emotions and memory, and, like a parasite, take up long-term residence, ready to come to the fore in moments of joy, grief, exhilaration, heartbrteak, whatever. No one aspires to write a song that catches the attention only while it’s being heard, then gets forgotten. That’s not how songs work.”

What he identifies is “something in the unresolved, incomplete quality of so many well-loved songs that’s significant here. In the world of prose fiction, there’s a strong impulse to achieve completeness; to tie every knot, answer every question, to leave no loose ends hanging. By contrast, in the world of songs, there’s a much lower bar when it comes to literal sense-making. The tiny amount of words available, the internal logic of the melody, the emotional content imposed by chords and chord sequences mean that the ability of a song to connect had little to do with, say, convincing psychological back stories or even the clear readability of the songs unfolding before us. It occurs to me that good songs may haunt the mind not despite their incompleteness, but because of it…”

The whole thing is worth reading, as are the 16 lyrics reproduced in the book, beautifully illustrated by the Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli in a bande dessinée style. If the occasional specificity of places and film references recalls Clive James’s efforts in a similar direction (mentions of Casablanca and Indochine, Les Invalides, “some tango in Macao”, “Gabin / Hooded eyes / A slow Gitanes / Weary deserter on the run”), the subtlety of the emotional engagement is closer to that of Fran Landesman, the writer of “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”. Ishiguro’s lyrics are sophisticated without being smart, precise but leaving intriguing gaps; they bear reading on the page, and their effect — like that of his mature prose — can linger in the mind.

As I said, I have no real memory of what happened on that Wednesday in 1975 when “Ishiguro, K” came by. It can’t have had any effect on his destiny. But I hope we were nice to him.

* Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain is published by Faber & Faber. Stacey Kent’s albums Breakfast on the Morning Tram and The Changing Lights, which contained some of the early fruits of their collaboration, set to music by Kent’s husband, the saxophonist and flautist Jim Tomlinson, were released in 2007 and 2013 respectively on the Blue Note label.

Mar 26

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New sounds in the Round

Mejedi Owusu (left) with his quintet at Jazz in the Round

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle at London’s music conservatoires in recent days over an email from a teacher claiming that white students in the jazz departments are disadvantaged by the preferences given to fellow students who are black. The teacher in question — and I won’t name him — is an eminent white musician in his sixties. He claims, in passing, that his own career has been hindered by discrimination in favour of black musicians, and it would not be hard to imagine that this sense of grievance may lie at the heart of his more general complaints.

These include the suggestions that because so few black students study classical music, a disproportionate number are allowed into the jazz courses in order to meet overall equality and diversity quotas within the institutions, and that white bandleaders employ black musicians at the expense of superior white candidates simply because their presence helps them get gigs and grants.

Anyway, his classes at Trinity Laban, the Guildhall and the Royal Academy of Music have been boycotted and he is currently at home on sick leave. While his supporters have been disparaging the students as woke snowflakes and getting up a petition to demand his reinstatement, his critics have set up a counter-petition calling for his permanent removal.

My view is that what he had to say in the email is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. Towards him personally, I’m old enough to feel a kind of sorrow tinging the hot anger with which his students have understandably responded. No doubt he thinks that he was smply being honest. But there had to be a better, wiser alternative to creating divisions where none should exist.

The success and visibility of young musicians of colour coming through the conservatoires and Tomorrow’s Warriors and similar schemes around the country in the last few years, working alongside their white contemporaries while bringing a new audience to the music, has been the healthiest collective phenomenon I can remember in six decades of listening to British jazz. Black musicians over-represented in jazz? About time, is all I can say.

As if to prove the point, last night’s edition of Jazz in the Round at the Cockpit Theatre in North London was opened, as is the custom at the monthly series, by a group of young musicians. This was a quintet let by the trumpeter Mejedi Owusu, who is 18 years old and a student at Trinity Laban. The line-up was completed by others from his cohort: Will Coode on alto and tenor saxophones, Chris Outhwaite on piano, Kielan Sheard on bass and Sacha Harlan on drums. They played three Owusu originals, and as they tore into the first of them, a jet-propelled piece titled “Paranoia”, every ear in the place was pinned back. For a minute the scalding trumpet-and-alto unisons allowed us to feel what it must have been like to be ringside at Birdland in the early 50s.

The second piece was a likeable composition called “Dark Eyes”, in the style of those Blue Note boogaloo pieces that Alfred Lion used to get Lee Morgan or Hank Mobley to write and record in the hope of getting jukebox exposure. The final piece was a ballad called “Affliction of the Innocent”, written a couple of years ago in the double shadow of the Covid-19 death toll and the murder of George Floyd, following the tradition of such elegant hard-bop threnodies as Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” and Freddie Hubbard’s “Lament for Booker”.

One thing the set confirmed is that it is usually harder, at least for relatively inexperienced musicians, to play a slow tune than a fast one. That comes with maturity. Owusu and his colleagues are at the beginning of their careers, with plenty of time for growth. You just hope that, when they emerge into the professional world, there’ll be work for them all — as well as for sixty-something teachers who may yet prove capable of learning from the voices of their students.

Mar 11

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Diamante visions

Phil Manzanera has been a friend since I first interviewed him during the days of Quiet Sun, the band of school friends he was in before being recruited by Roxy Music in time to play on their debut album in 1972. So I can’t pretend to be completely objective about Revolución to Roxy, his newly published autobiography. But I can be completely honest in saying that it will prove informative and entertaining to anyone who’s followed his career over the past half-century, even from a distance.

Here’s a sample that had me almost collapsing with laughter, when he spins a metaphor out of one of the trappings of early success: a maroon Rolls-Royce coupé whose combination of heavy weight and light steering was guaranteed to induce car sickness in children, making it “completely useless as an everyday family vehicle” and forcing him to keep in storage, bringing it out only on special occasions.

“The car carried a famous brand name,” he writes, “it was sleek, stylish and smooth, and undoubtedly in its own way it was iconic. It was a treat to take out, and whenever I did, it was admired and enjoyed by everyone who experienced it. Eventually, though, the time would come when it needed to go back into the garage and once again be covered by the tarpaulin to keep it well preserved and in good order, ready for the next outing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. There was something about that Roller which felt to me to be a bit like Roxy Music. Eye-catching, stylish and high quality, extremely enjoyable and I was proud to be associated with it. From time to time, it would be an absolute joy to take out for a ride so that it could be admired and appreciated; but the ‘steering’ difficulties and the resultant discomfort meant that its outings were strictly limited. After a while it had to go back under the tarpaulin so I could live my everyday life in my runabout.”

The history of Roxy Music as a kind of artistic Petri dish is, of course, explored in some depth throughout these 300 pages, from Manzanera’s first failed audition through the years of great success to the period in which, he began to feel like “not much more than a session player in my own band” — a band in which “I had to find out what was going on more or less by accident.”

Not least, the book is an interesting exploration of rock-band dynamics, with all the associated uncertainties, insecurities, frustrations and exasperations, and Manzanera has a perceptive take on Bryan Ferry’s legendary penchant for procrastination and prevarication: “His Fine Arts background obliged him to tinker and fiddle way beyond the point where the vast majority of people would long since have settled. I now understand this is about his need to make everything he does artistically beautiful and perfect. I tend to want to do things quickly and I’m not worried if they have a primitive edge, and what I’ve learned is that in Roxy opposites can attract. That’s integral to what makes Roxy music special. Makes it us. Makes us it.”

As musical director of the Guitar Legends festival in Spain is 1991, he had the job of telling Bob Dylan that the organisers expected him to perform “All Along the Watchtower”. How he coped and got there in the end, with the aid of Richard Thompson, is worthy of a place in Ray Padgett’s recent book of interviews with people who’ve worked with Dylan. Recollecting in tranquillity, Manzanera writes: “The way I think about the whole thing is much the same as I used to think about my first visit to various foreign countries. I’m really keen to go, really keen to get to know their individual customs and idiosyncrasies, but having been there and done that, I don’t necessarily ever feel the urge to revisit.”

There are stories about his long collaboration with David Gilmour, a shorter and almost Dylanesque one with the Argentinian hero Fito Paez, a WOMAD tour of South Africa and the Antipodes, his discoveries of the pizzica music of Puglia while directing another festival, his adventures with Jack Bruce in Cuba, his songwriting partnership with Tim Finn and his long relationship with Robert Wyatt. And about 801, that short-lived but incandescent all-star band he created in 1976 with Brian Eno, Bill MacCormick, Francis Monkman, Simon Phillips and Lloyd Watson. And, of course, about those diamante-studded bug-eyed sunglasses created for him in Roxy’s early days by Antony Price.

But, as the man who interviewed Phil for today’s Times observed, this isn’t one of those rock-star biogs where you skip the early chapters dealing with childhood, family and schooldays. In this case, that aspect of the narrative is quite as compelling as the rock-star stuff. Phil was born in London but grew up in Cuba during the run-up to the Castro revolution, the son of an Englishman, Duncan Targett-Adams, who had worked for the British Council in Colombia but now represented BOAC in South America, and a Colombian mother, Magdalena Manzanera. There were mysterious elements on his father’s side of the family — was he a spy? where did an Italian opera singer fit into the picture? — and the Latino influence from his mother’s side on his life and work is interestingly explored.

In a way, though, the most striking passage in the book come when he discusses the phone call from America one day in 2012 in which he was told that Kanye West and Jay Z had sampled a riff from K-Scope, his slightly obscure second solo album, then more than 30 years old. They used it on “No Church in the Wild”, a bleak modern masterpiece and the lead track from their album Watch the Throne, which went platinum in the US and gold in the UK before the track appeared in ads for Audi and Dodge cars. Most significantly of all, as it turned out, it was used by Baz Luhrmann on the soundtrack and the trailer for The Great Gatsby.

“Who knew,” Phil writes, in a sentence that tells you a great deal about the evolution of the music industry in our lifetime, “that I would earn more money from a short guitar riff I wrote one evening on a sofa in front of the telly in 1978 than I ever earned in the entire 50 years as a member of Roxy Music?”

* Phil Manzanera’s Revolución to Roxy is published by A Way With Media (£35)

Mar 8

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The artwork of British jazz

Who could have imagined, as the music and those who made it were fighting for their existence, the three-figure sums that British jazz albums from the ’60s and ’70s would be fetching in a new century? To some, Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75, a large-format book containing threequarter-size reproductions of the front and back sleeves of 161 albums, plus another 140 at a smaller scale, will be a catalogue of longing and desire.

Look! Original copies (cond: VG) of Joe Harriott’s Abstract and David Mack’s 12-tone New Directions on Columbia, of Poetry and Jazz in Concert on Argo, of Mike Westbrook’s Celebration on Deram, of The People Band on Transatlantic, Bob Downes’s Open Music on Philips and Ric Colbeck’s The Sun Is Coming Up on Fontana! The first LPs by Howard Riley on the Opportunity label and Back Door on the Blakey imprint! The SME’s debut on Eyemark! Mike Taylor’s Pendulum! The only recording of the Chitinous Ensemble, directed by Paul Buckmaster! Guy Warren of Ghana! Lots of Michael Garrick, Graham Collier, Gordon Beck, Tony Oxley, Tubby Hayes, Stan Tracey, Keith Tippett, Alan Skidmore, Rendell & Carr, Ray Russell… all the way to the Nottingham Jazz Orchestra’s Festival Suite, released on Doug Dobell’s Swift label.

Richard Morton Jack gives a brief commentary on each album, with quotes from reviews, and there’s an introduction by Tony Reeves, probably most famous as the bass player with Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, who describes how he, a Lewisham schoolboy, found his way into the scene as a player and a producer, with Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra, whose Western Reunion and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe are featured, and others.

What a time it was — although, as I said, it was always a struggle for those trying to make a living in jazz clubs up and down the country, despite the efforts of intrepid A&R men/producers like Denis Preston, Terry Brown, Peter Eden and Giorgio Gomelsky to persuade Decca, EMI, Philips, Pye, Polydor and CBS to record this adventurous music.

Labyrinth finds a different and very enjoyable way of telling the story, exploiting the artwork and the information contained within 12 x 12 album jackets, back in the days of helpful sleeve notes. And if I had the choice of all these albums, but could keep only one? It would probably be the Blue Notes’ Very Urgent, their first recording after landing in the UK from South Africa. Produced by Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques and issued on Polydor under Chris McGregor’s name, it’s as exhilarating today as it was back in 1968, and its long-term influence is still to be felt, even in the work of young musicians then unborn.

* Richard Morton Jack’s Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75 is published by Lansdowne Books (£60)

Mar 1

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The Ballad of Bob and Rita

On the way to the cinema to see One Love last night, my thoughts went back to 1967, and buying the Wailers’ “Put It On” on an Island 45 at the West Indian record shop on Union Street in Nottingham, near the bus station. And to 1972, and spending hours at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, listening to them recording tracks for Catch A Fire, sharing Chris Blackwell’s pleasure as he realised what a good decision he’d made when he advanced them — in a move so unusual in the Jamaican record industry as to be unique — enough money to make an album. Who could have imagined then that Bob Marley, having first become a global symbol, would eventually turn into an industry, the generator of posthumous books, exhibitions, a musical and now a feature film?

So I was going to the film slightly reluctantly, in a mood of mild pessimism, even cynicism. How sensible, after all, is it to expect Hollywood to treat something you know a bit and care quite a lot about with sensitivity and respect? An hour and a half later I emerged in a very different frame of mind.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film concentrates on one short period of Marley’s life, from his shooting by political gunmen two days before a planned Peace Concert in December 1976 through the 18 months in London during which he recorded Exodus before returning home for the One Love concert, in which he stood between the prime minister, Michael Manley, and the leader of the opposition, Edward Seaga, and made them join hands.

It isn’t a biopic, although there are flashbacks to Marley’s early years: to the departure of his father, to his introduction to the cult of Rastafari, to the day the producer Clement Dodd invited the nascent Wailers into the studio. The earliest of these are framed, very effectively, as dreamlike childhood memories. But the bulk of the film concentrates on the narrow span of time in which he rose to his fullest artistic height (Exodus is his What’s Going On or Innervisions) while first surviving the would-be assassins’ bullets and then receiving the diagnosis of the cancer that would kill him in 1981, aged 36.

No praise is too high for Kingsley Ben-Adir, the British actor playing Marley. Ben-Adir, who portrayed Malcolm X in the brilliant One Night in Miami a few years ago, doesn’t look much like Marley, and his speaking voice is deeper, but he finds the physical litheness, the fleeting expressions and the inflections of speech, and the distinctive air of watchfulness, that evoke the man very clearly and accurately.

He’s well matched by Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, Bob’s wife, the mother of three of his 11 children, and a member (with Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths) of the I-Threes, his backing singers. Lynch does the long-suffering thing with a light touch and a range of nuance to match that of Ben-Adir. The family’s involvement in the production might call the accuracy of the depiction of their relationship into question, but the two actors make you believe in it for an hour and a half, at least, giving the film its emotional core.

The dramatis personae includes many of the characters who made contributions to Bob’s life, from Mortimer Planno, the Rasta philosopher, through Joe Higgs, his musical mentor, and Gilly the cook to Neville Garrick, the brilliant graphic designer, who died last year. And, of course, the musicians, who populate the scenes in rehearsals and recording studios that bring the songs from Exodus fully to life. It helps to have Aston Barrett Jr, one of Family Man’s sons, playing bass, but the actor-musicians playing Tyrone Downie, Carlton Barrett, Seeco Patterson, Junior Marvin and the rest are completely convincing, as is the depiction of the atmosphere within Island’s London studios.

The film is unfair, I think, on Chris Blackwell, who is played by James Norton — a reasonable match in visual terms, but coming across as far smoother and more superficial and ingratiating than the real thing. Blackwell’s concentration on Marley’s career eventually brought him the enmity of Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, but his vision and commitment created the opportunity for Jamaican music, spearheaded by the Wailers, to establish itself as a creative contributor to the music of the world.

But, you know, this is a story about black creativity and culture, told for once by black people, and if it’s the white people — record executives, promotion people and journalists — who look like the outsiders, then that’s more than fine. The use throughout of unsubtitled Jamaican patois is a way of making people like me aware that we’re being invited to enter another world.

And, of course, you come out of the cinema with the music in your ears, brilliantly rendered: the war cries and lamentations and songs of seduction and redemption, all still gloriously full of that defiant sweetness.